UBC Hospital (UBCH) is expanding its surgical capacity. Developing into VCH-Vancouver’s hub for scheduled surgeries, the hospital added orthopedic revisions and – as reported in last week’s issue of VCH News — neurosurgery cases to its slate in January 2017.

“The acuity of surgical patients is increasing,” says Sandy Strelioff, patient services manager of the operating rooms (ORs) and Post-Anesthetic Care Unit at the time of transition. “To care for more complex patients, staff have shown tremendous initiative and commitment.”

From pre-op to post-op, care staff prepared to welcome new patients in the closing weeks of 2016, including inservice sessions on neurosurgery for OR nurses at VGH. But what staff accomplished behind the OR scenes in just two short months was just as critical.

Dr. Chris Honey and team in the OR, prepared to make neurosurgical history at UBCH.

New storage and a freezer for bone and tissue were installed in the OR equipment area. Upgrades in the Medical Device Reprocessing Department (MDRD) are even more impressive.

To support new surgeries at UBCH, the MDRD team made way for additional instruments — a staggering 80 containers’ worth of instruments. Staff took on extra shifts to inventory and learn new and more complex processes for sterilizing instruments, all in the midst of renovations. MDRD now boasts new instrument washers, a new state-of-the-art cart washer, a new instrument sterilizer and new high-efficiency cube storage units.

“With these upgrades UBC Hospital has what it needs to process 30 per cent more instruments, including extremely sensitive instruments for neurosurgery,” says Albert Csapo, MDRD manager. “More importantly, we also have a team who’s been nothing short of fantastic in adapting to the hospital’s growing importance as a surgical site.”

 Learn more

• Life-altering surgery a first at UBCH
• UBCH Renewal Project Bulletin-February 2017
• UBCH Renewal Project website (internal link on VCH Connect)